Term of the Day

Shovelware is a derogatory term used for software that has either been quickly developed without regard to quality or function and features, or software that has been forced on customers such as those that are preloaded on laptops or smartphones by their respective carriers.
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Sales Compensation planning season is right around the corner, and there’s no better time than now to start preparing! Join compensation expert Robert Blohm, Xactly’s VP of Strategic Services, for an on-demand webinar which will share industry best practices regarding preparation efforts to help ensure you are ready. We’ll cover everything you need to do BEFORE you start designing. With the right preparation, your new plans will be grounded in reality and guided by the best thinking in your organization. Prepare to succeed.

The number one driver of your organization’s success is sales performance.
In this new eBook, 10 industry experts provide their top tips on how to inspire sales reps and maximize their selling power. With decades of sales management and training experience between them, they share proven practices to accelerate performance across your organization.
You will learn how to:
Improve coaching and training processes with weekly teaching labs and goal setting
Motivate behaviors through incentives like SPIFs, bonuses, and recognition awards
Build a better team culture by taking the time to personally connect with reps
Increase rep productivity with practical advice you can start using today
Don’t miss this guide on how you can incorporate continuous improvement and drive better performance. Download the eBook today!

Lead scoring is a key missing link in many B2B marketing strategies. A growing number of B2B marketers understand this vital role lead scoring plays in the marketing process. Yet they still face challenges getting started with lead scoring and learning how to generate a measureable ROI from their efforts. In this whitepaper you will learn seven foundational steps your company can take to set up a functional and cost-effective lead scoring strategy. These include understanding the fundamentals of lead scoring; learning how to identify the traits that define your ideal sales prospects; and building a system that will grow with your organization over time.

Lead Generation is the top priority for marketing directors in 2009. More importantly, marketers are being charged with defending their budgets and demonstrating real ROI for their marketing programs. Use this How-To Guide to learn how other world-class companies are developing lead generation infrastructures that automate key processes, measure results, and provide a steady flow of qualified leads their sales organizations.

Learn how leveraging a defined, repeatable sales process enables both sales and marketing organizations to drive consistent, and therefore more predictable, behavior and results. If your organization has a defined sales process, you can track your ability to successfully execute that process.

This paper discusses how Best-In-Class organizations have demonstrated a significant emphasis on providing sales leaders with better information in order to make better decisions. Continue reading to learn how organizations that also deployed solutions such as SAP CRM were consistently among the Best-In-Class.

Designed for the sales executive, this series of research briefs focuses on the advent of metrics-based sales productivity and the new approaches delivering huge dividends to forward-thinking sales organizations.

Seamlessly integrating e-signature into the sales order process will result in dramatic cost savings, improve client preception and enable organizations to scale their sales operations more effectively.

There's a better way to manage deals -- For a sales organization, email and CRMs don't enable precise teamwork. Read this white paper to learn how social business tools bring critical deal management capabilities.

As a marketer, you know how critical it is to understand how your marketing efforts contribute to the bottom line. There’s a lot that goes on behind-the-scenes to generate sales pipeline and ultimately revenue. And by becoming a data-driven marketer that’s in tune with the right metrics, you can demonstrate marketing’s contribution to both.
Metrics illustrate the impact that you and your team are driving in the organization, which is critical to ensure you have the budget and resources you need to deliver optimum business outcomes. Without metrics, it’s nearly impossible to measure the success of your activities and identify elements to optimize in future campaigns. And without them, there’s no way to determine your return on investment (ROI).

Salesforce.com is an industry leading cloud CRM solution which helps organizations streamline and effectively manage sales processes, customers and opportunities. The effectiveness of these initiatives can be improved dramatically by providing Salesforce with a 3600 view of the Customer to overcome the limitation of fragmented data that Salesforce currently relies on.
This paper discusses how InfoSphere capabilities can be used to create comprehensive and accurate 3600 views of your customers from internal and external sources. This data is integrated seamlessly within Salesforce.com to help your sales teams get a complete view of the customer to help find the right contacts, allocate resources efficiently and identify new opportunities. This helps your sales teams be more efficient, effective and ultimately improve your win rate and drive more revenue.

For years, organizations have recognized that a better understanding of customers can translate to more sales, increased customer satisfaction and reduced customer churn. Initiatives focused on a 360-degree view of the customer have gone a long way toward providing those benefits by synthesizing customer profiles, sales history and other structured data from multiple sources across the enterprise.
But today, customer-centric organizations are discovering that there is more opportunity for growth when they enhance that 360-degree view with information from more sources, both within and beyond the enterprise (see Figure 1). Information in email messages, unstructured documents and social media sentiments—previously beyond reach—is now extending the 360-degree view.

Hundreds of sales organizations are already actively using DocuSign to streamline their operations and accelerate deal processing and closing. And for good reason: 56% for your customers expect digital transactions. DTM is the only way to deliver it.

Finance is constantly tested to keep pace in today’s business environment. To keep up, planning needs to become a continuous process that spans departmental boundaries and enables managers to collectively realign resources to respond to market changes.
Organizations must streamline disparate sales and operational planning with traditional financial planning and analysis by using technology to connect people, data, and processes across the organization.

In a modern B2B sales process, it’s not easy connecting a lead to the right rep. It’s no secret that the traditional way of managing leads within Salesforce is rigid and labor-intensive. This eBook dives into best practices about lead routing and converting. Learn how a well-designed, automated lead management process maximizes the impact of every lead coming into your organization.

When organizations are managing sales performance, it is critical to balance and align each enablement and operational component. Misalignment – or too much focus on one element –can dramatically detract from performance levels and the ability to measure results. An organization may temporarily need to emphasize a particular component when it sees a challenge, but ultimately success depends on striking the correct balance across all SPM components.

Mobile, relationship intelligence, and sales coaching are necessities for today’s sales organization and are pervasive capabilities for every sales automation solution category. No vendor solely offers these capabilities without complementing them with other functions.
Instead, they are embedded across the categories mentioned above. For example, sales content management providers cannot compete without extensive mobile expertise; market intelligence and customer success do not work without relationship intelligence; and sales coaching is not constrained only to the sales performance management vendors.

Mobile, relationship intelligence, and sales coaching are necessities for today’s sales organization and are pervasive capabilities for every sales automation solution category. No vendor solely offers these capabilities without complementing them with other functions.
Instead, they are embedded across the categories mentioned above. For example, sales content management providers cannot compete without extensive mobile expertise; market intelligence and customer success do not work without relationship intelligence; and sales coaching is not constrained only to the sales performance management vendors.